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Welcome back to Invested Early.
An OpenAI-backed holding company agreed Thursday to pay $10 a share in cash for ADT, a 46% premium for a 150-year-old alarm business, on the same day AI fears gave ServiceNow its worst day ever. Iovance, our August spotlight, lost 35% on lung cancer data it called positive. And Xerox fell 40% after suspending its dividend. Small caps came out ahead: the Russell 2000 rose 1% for a fourth straight gain while Alphabet's 12.6% drop pulled the Nasdaq down 1.4%.
Here's what's inside today:
🧬 How to read a biotech subgroup
🔐 Why an AI holding company bought ADT
📊 An AI score for every name in this issue
📈 Thursday's biggest gainers (and losers)
This is not financial advice. Always do your own research. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results.
In partnership with Guardian
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How to Read a Biotech Subgroup
Iovance called Thursday's lung cancer update positive. The stock fell 35%.
The headline number barely moved: 17 of 69 patients responded to its cell therapy, a 24.6% response rate, in line with what earlier patients showed. What changed was the pitch. Iovance looked at which patients did best and found a slice:
All 69 patients: 24.6% responded
KRAS wild-type tumors (30 patients): 43.3%
KRAS and HER2 wild-type, current or former smokers (22 patients): 59.1%
Those 22 patients produced 13 of the 17 responses, and the company is building a new trial around them.
Four questions to ask of any subgroup:
Was it chosen before or after the results? Iovance's was retrospective, drawn after the data came in.
How many patients? With 22, each response moves the rate by about 4.5 points.
What happened to everyone else? The other 47 patients produced four responses, about 8.5%.
What will test it? Iovance's prospective cohort, POSITILITY, starts enrolling in November.
The pattern may hold up, and the company cites research linking KRAS to how lung tumors evade immune cells. Until a trial that selects patients up front confirms it, the market treats it as a hypothesis. Iovance closed Thursday at $9.56, above the $8.99 where we profiled it in August but well off the $14.81 it reached after a September guidance raise.
Why an AI Holding Company Bought ADT
ADT went public at $14 a share in 2018. On Thursday a buyer agreed to take it private at $10, and the stock still jumped 33%.
The news: Thrive Holdings agreed to buy ADT for $10 a share in cash, a 45.6% premium to its October 27 close. The deal values ADT's stock at $7.6 billion and the whole company at $15.3 billion including debt. Apollo, which took ADT public and sold its last shares in May, is providing the financing. ADT closed Thursday at $9.87.
Why it matters: Thrive Capital launched Thrive Holdings in April 2025 to buy and run service businesses that could get more out of AI. OpenAI took a stake in December and puts its own engineers inside Thrive's companies. Until now that meant more than 75 businesses in accounting, IT services and the built environment. ADT is a far bigger target, and it fits a profile worth screening for:
Subscription revenue: $360 million a month in recurring monitoring revenue at midyear.
Lots of work to automate: more than 12,000 employees across monitoring and field service.
A cheap stock: shares had spent years below the IPO price.
The same day ServiceNow sold off on fears that AI will replace its software, AI money paid cash for an old-economy company with steady customers.
The honest risk: At $9.87, ADT trades 13 cents under the offer, so new buyers make about 1.3% if the deal closes as planned in early 2027. It still needs stockholder and antitrust approval. A higher bid could surface before November 28, while ADT is allowed to shop itself to rivals, but buying now is mostly a bet on that. Holders from the 2018 IPO are still down about 29% before dividends.
An AI Score for Every Name in This Issue
Our partners at AltIndex publish an AI Stock Analysis page for every stock they track.
Each page rolls a company's fundamentals, price trend and more than 25 alternative data signals (hiring, web traffic, app downloads, online sentiment) into one AI Score from 0 to 100, with a plain Buy, Hold or Sell read. It also shows which of four categories is pushing the score up or down. The score refreshes as new data arrives, while most analyst ratings change a few times a year.
AltIndex AI Stock Analysis page for Iovance
On Thursday evening, Iovance sat at 58 out of 100, a Hold, with fundamentals and sentiment reading bullish and technicals and alternative data neutral. Swap the ticker in the address to pull up ADT, Xerox or anything you own.
AltIndex is a partner; Invested Inc. may earn a commission on referrals.
🎢 The Small-Cap Scoreboard
Here's where Thursday's biggest moves landed. Earnings and one buyout drove the gainers, while guidance cuts, a jury verdict and a clinical update filled the losers.
🟢 Yesterday’s biggest gainers
Symbol | Company | Price | Change | Market Cap | 52-Wk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ADT Inc. | $9.87 | +33.2% | $7.2B | +13.3% | |
Bausch Health | $8.91 | +28.8% | $3.3B | +43.9% | |
Porch Group | $20.89 | +28.2% | $2.4B | +34.9% | |
Teladoc Health | $8.73 | +26.9% | $1.6B | +4.4% | |
Climb Global Solutions | $41.84 | +26.3% | $769.4M | +25.3% |
🔴 Yesterday’s biggest losers
Symbol | Company | Price | Change | Market Cap | 52-Wk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Xerox Holdings | $1.665 | -40.3% | $220.9M | -53.4% | |
Iovance Biotherapeutics | $9.56 | -35.5% | $4.3B | +336.5% | |
Caesarstone | $1.69 | -31.9% | $58.5M | +43.2% | |
Titan International | $4.91 | -25.8% | $316.9M | -36.9% | |
Sprouts Farmers Market | $48.00 | -22.6% | $4.4B | -55.1% |
Earnings filled most of the gainers table. Porch raised its full-year outlook for revenue and profit, Teladoc beat revenue estimates, and Bausch Health raised guidance for a second straight quarter. ADT came from the buyout covered above.
Xerox lost 40% after cutting its profit and free cash flow forecasts, suspending its dividend and taking a $959 million goodwill write-down. Caesarstone lost almost a third after a California jury returned a $67.7 million silicosis verdict and held its companies 69.1% responsible, a share close to the company's entire market value.
(Data: Yahoo Finance.)
🫡 See You Soon
An OpenAI-backed buyer paying cash for a 150-year-old alarm company, a cancer stock that lost a third on data it called positive, and a copier maker that suspended its dividend. Software giants sold off on fears that AI will replace them, while AI money went shopping for an old-economy business, and the Russell 2000 finished the day ahead of the Nasdaq.
We'll be back soon. Watching a name we should cover? Hit reply and tell us.
Cheers,
— Brandon & Blake of Invested Inc.
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